New Delhi: You are reading this post on a website (or probably some variant of it) and it was 20 years ago, on August 6, 1991 that the first website went online.
Tim Barners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, had on this day, two decades back, posted a summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup and the first ever website http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html became publicly available. Unfortunately there are no screenshots available of the original page a copy of a later version of the page is available on www.w3.org.
While the Internet had been around for much longer than websites, it was due to websites that our lives have changed so visibly in the last two decades. This is akin to what the graphic user interface did for the mass the popularity of computers.
Most people tend to treat the Internet and the Web as synonymous. They, in fact while being related, are not. Internet refers to the vast networking infrastructure that connects millions of computers across the world and the World Wide Web is only a method of accessing information over the Internet through web pages. The Web uses the HTTP protocol to transmit data and is only a part of the Internet. The Internet includes a lot that is not necessarily the Web.
Today the Web is used for a multifarious purpose, it was initially envisaged as a tool to aid physicists.
Domain names that now form the base of the Web ecosystem, pre-dates the first website by six years. The first commercial domain name symbolics.com was registered on March 15, 1985.
info.cern.ch was the first Web server and by 1992 there were 50 Web servers around the world, now there are millions.
Prior to September 14, 1995 domain name registrations were free as they were subsidised by the US National Science Foundation.
Before the browser wars began in the mid 1990s Microsoft founder Bill Gates in an interview with Don Tennant remarked that "an Internet browser is a trivial piece of software." Netscape co-founder Jim Clark, when told about Gates' opinion on Web browsers retorted "MS-DOS is a trivial piece of software." Now we know, and Bill Gates will also acknowledge, that Web browsers is much, much more than a product of little significance.
In an early 1996 interview with the Wired Steve Jobs, who was then with NeXT, expressed his fears about Microsoft dominating the Web. "If the Web doesn't reach ubiquity in the next two years, Microsoft will own it. And that will be the end of it," Jobs said. Thankfully that didn't happen but Microsoft went on to indirectly dominate the Web with its ubiquitous Internet Explorer web browser.
If you dislike Internet users being addressed to as 'surfers', blame Jean Armour Polly. It was she who coined the term "Surfing the Internet".
Archie was the first tool to search the Internet. Released in 1990 it indexed FTP archives. W3Catalog, launched in September 1993 was one of the first Web search engines.
Pornography constitutes a big chunk of the Web for most of its existence, but the first website on the .xxx domain (meant for adult websites) went online in August 2011.
According to worldwidewebsize.com, as of August 5, 2011, the Web contains of least 19.68 billion pages. That is more than three times the world's population.
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